Sanjaya lived every moment like it was his last… until around the top ten when he become completely deluded. Not that he really had any choice in the matter. Sanjaya’s big head was ceremoniously placed on his shoulders by a media who’d reached their saturation point with Anna Nicole Smith. Sanjaya sucks, and he won’t go away. What does this say about the competition? What does this say about America?
Um… Absolutely nothing.
In retrospect, I sure hope that everyone finds Sanjayagate as foolish as I did. It seems that more has been written about him in the last three weeks than any other Idol contestant to date, yet all of these dark predictions of his winning the title and steering pop music into the proverbial iceberg didn’t come anywhere reasonably close to fruition. Each season has had an awkward, untalented, ambiguous high school boy. Sanjaya was just the first who was willing to ham it up.
Remember this little turd? He was a horrible singer with no stage presence and even less personality, yet he beat out Jennifer Hudson and made it to the top 6. Nobody was calling him one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, and Idol continued to gain momentum, unscathed. Last season, Kevin Covais had similar aspirations of being the pubescent barnacle on the U.S.S. Idol, but he was knocked out just before the top 10. Regardless, the votes of the American public carried him long after he should have been sent back to homeroom.
After hours of cable news coverage and too many blog posts to read in one lifetime, we are already Sanjayaless with almost two months left until the end of the season. Sanjaya will return for the finale with some grand, unimaginable haircut; he’ll go on the tour and make little girls cry in 42 the 50 states; he’ll probably even be able to milk his cult of personality well into his 20s, but he’ll never be an American Idol. And while I’m glad to see Howard Stern and the self-important tools at Vote for the Worst are now learning that they aren’t as influential as they’d been giving themselves credit for, it will be with a heavy heart that I turn on next week’s episode. As much as I didn’t want him to win, he at least provided some fodder – a rarity in this ho-hum season.
It may have already gone into heavy rotation, but I leave you with this Sanjaya-themed clip from my favorite TV critics and vloggers, Buns & Chou Chou…
I remember that turd! I loved him, he sang like Frank Sinatra…